These appear to be Nabu network PCs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NABU_Network) that were, indeed, meant to be intelligent set-top boxes and had little to no firmware or mass storage since their software was meant to come over the cable network. Inside, they're little Z80 systems that might actually be able to run CP/M, but the home versions (of which these almost certainly are) didn't have the disk interface that would enable this http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/nabu/index.htm At the very least, some of the bigger chips (possibly the TMS9918 GPU and AY-3-8910) may be socketed and thus easy to recover. Even better, it looks like there's available technical documentation on the (meagre) firmware, memory map, etc. http://dunfield.classiccmp.org/nabu/nabutech.pdf There might even be schematics out there, although I couldn't quickly find them online. Bottom line: yes, it will be a brick when first purchased, but could lead to many interesting projects. Making it work like it did in the 1980s would be an enormous (and perhaps unrealistic) undertaking, although after seeing what the "Weather Machine" folks did at the last VCF East I've had to adjust what I think of as unrealistic. Some group actually did try to build an emulator, however https://museum.eecs.yorku.ca/nabu I maintain that at $20, they're interesting little boxes